Russian women equal, but only on the surface

Although more Russian women than men have university degrees, women on average make less money and hold less prestigious positions.

Since
the Soviet era, more Russian women
than men
have received university degrees, yet their
earnings and position in the job market are far
lower than those of men.

According
to a 2010 report into gender research by the Russian Federation
Statistics Service Rosstat, in 1989 there were 6.73 million
women who had studied in institutions of higher learning compared with
6 million men. In 2002,
the difference
was even more striking: there were 10.76 million women
who had studied at universities compared with 8.61
million men.

"It is a vicious circle: Without completing
their studies, men receive higher salaries than better-educated
women, and as a result there is no incentive for the men to study. For
their part, women, already realizing they are at a disadvantage,
try
to make up ground and specialize more and more,"
said
Zoya Khotkina, a specialist in the study
of female employment placement at the Moscow Center
for Gender Research. According to her, Russian women’s salaries are 40
percent of men’s.

Following a Western trend

According to sociologist Marilia
Moschkovich, who researches gender in
education at the University of Campinas in Brazil, such
disparities reflect a general trend in Western countries such as Brazil, the United
States, France and Germany.

"In the words of the French sociologist Christian
Baudelot, it is as if schools have created the feeling that there is more
equality of opportunity, therefore women manage to go to school and succeed,
but it seems that society does not support such equality of opportunities
outside the institutions," said
Moschkovich.

"There are two factors which go hand in hand: the horizontal concentration of women
in highly-specialized, but less prestigious and less well paid areas; and
vertical concentration, where, within each field, there are very high and very
low positions, with women tending to hold the latter, even where they are
better educated than the men," Moschkovich
added.

With the recent global financial crisis
and resulting unemployment, the unequal treatment received
by women in the employment market has been even more apparent. In 2008, 416,800
women held executive positions compared with 645,640 men; by 2009, however only
33.7 percent of these positions were held by women compared with 66.3 percent
of positions held by men.

In Russia, equality between men and women is guaranteed by
Paragraph 19 of Article 3 of the Constitution, according to which "men and
women enjoy equal rights and freedoms and have equal possibilities to exercise
them." However, Article 253 of the Russian Employment Code lists approximately
600 jobs "where the use of female labor is prohibited."

"Included in those are really strenuous jobs such as
mining and other underground work, but where something is prohibited, there is
then the possibility to restrict to jobs where there is no danger whatsoever. This results in a
scenario where, underground, a woman cannot work as a machine operator, which
is a highly skilled and well-paid job,
but she can clean the dirt from the floor," said Khotinka.

In 2009, Anna Klevets, then 22, brought an lawsuit in St.
Petersburg challenging the ban on women working as machine operators
underground, after she was not allowed to do so the previous year by a
state-run company. The court, referring to the Russian Employment Code, found
against Klevets.